The orthography used in these pages,
which is the same as the one adopted by the
Roman Catholic Church for its publications in Nawatl,
is based on the proposals of
Andrés Hasler (1995).
/k/ is written
k,
/w/ is written
w, and the
"saltillo" is written
h.

The following table gives the Orizaba Nawatl
alphabet,
with the phonemes represented by each orthographic
symbol and their (most common)
phonetic
pronunciations.

Some of these letters are pronounced somewhat differently
from one town to another. For instance, intervocalic
k is pronounced
[k] in some towns,
[g] in others,
syllable-initial or intervocalic
w is pronounced
[w] in some towns and
[v] or
[β] in others,
and syllable-final w
may be pronounced
voiceless
([W]) in some places, and
[h] in others.

Vowel length
is not written in this orthography;
the context serves to disambiguate most of the
relatively few cases where that is the only difference
between words. Neither is stress marked: it is usually
penultimate,
with certain systematic exceptions.
Some consonants occur doubled: they are pronounced
long.
The most common of these is
ll,
which usually arises from the combination of an
l with a
tl; it is not pronounced
[y] like its Spanish
look-alike, but rather as a long
[l].

Since Nawatl has no
diphthongs,
each vowel belongs to a different syllable.
(The u of
ku is not a vowel,
but part of a complex consonant.)
So when a word ends with two vowels,
the accent (penultimate stress) usually falls on
the first of these. Thus a word like
kitlaliahe puts it
is accented on the i,
rhyming with the Spanish word
valíait was worth rather than
ItaliaItaly.

In forms which are borrowed from Spanish
other sounds may occur; they are written with
the appropriate letter from the Spanish alphabet.
Some of these letters are:
b, d,
g, r,
and ñ.